Skinny Cows

A few days ago, we visited all the tourist hot spots: Chamundi Hill, Maharaja Palace, and an ancient temple. And while all of these sites were beautiful what struck me throughout the day were all the skinny cows I saw. In the U.S., we are a society where everything is big. We're obese, we supersize our burgers and drinks, we eat the Texas cowboy cut of steak and we never, never have skinny cows.

But here in India, where finding an extra large shirt has been an ordeal (It's taken me several stores and several alterations), everything is small. We are all giants standing next to the men. At the wedding I went to the other day, it was a shocker to find a woman my size and my height. It took everything I had to stop myself from asking her where she shops. To be big means to have money. To be big means to have custom clothes, to ride in a car and not six to a rickshaw.

If anything was going to be big, I thought it'd be the cows. But more often than not, they are tiny. And while beef for the most part isn't eaten and cows are never killed, one can see the status of India simply by looking at the cows. This is a place, at least Mysore is, where there are so many people that are struggling to survive that cows, who are sacred to their Hindu beliefs, are undernourished.

And yet I still think of the people here as more religious than people in America. In America, we bend Christianity to fit our needs. We have prosperity preachers who make wanting money an act that can bring you closer to God. In Mysore, I don't think people bend Hinduism to fit their needs.